


To Sing Against the Wind

by ashurbadaktu



Category: Son of a Witch - Gregory Maguire, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-08
Updated: 2011-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-21 04:24:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashurbadaktu/pseuds/ashurbadaktu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A freak storm delivers a new mutant for Charles and Erik's recruitment, though what part he might play in the plans against Shaw are anyone's guess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Storm

Erik was reasonably certain that Kansas went on forever. He wasn’t sure how it was done, but somehow there was some manner of shift in time and space that made every road at least fifty miles longer than it needed to be and every turn off then required at least ten miles before the promised gas or food or other amenity was provided. The most recent stop had proved a little more convenient, only five miles through the middle of nowhere which was only slightly to the north of the nowhere they’d been heading for before then.

Erik was extremely thankful for this oddity, however, as it was almost immediately after they hurried into the hastily-procured motel room that the winds started whipping, howling like wild beasts in the early evening.

Charles, as usual, took the whole thing in stride.

“Dear God, listen to that? Amazing. Truly amazing.” The smaller man rushed to the window to look out at storm, his eyes glued to the bending trees and the beginnings of a truly torrential rain. Erik tried to settle himself, but he had to admit he didn’t like the idea of Charles quite so close to the glass. There wasn’t much he could do about it, however, so he set to work pulling out his things and the meager sandwich supplies he’d remembered to snatch out of the car before they ran in.

“It’s rain, Charles. Or are you thinking of switching your focus to meteorology?”

Charles turned from the window and closed the curtains behind him, which was more of a relief than he liked to admit, before heading for the bed to sit.

“I may have to someday,” he admitted with a faint smile. Erik only tilted his head, urging his friend to continue.

“Ororo Munroe,” he said, his delight almost palpable, “too young for our current needs but someday, I hope, I will get to work with her and ask her about her fascinating ability.”

HIs eyes went to the window.

“Her mutation allows her to control the weather, everything from a full-scale storm to a localized lightning bolt.” The thought made him smile again. “She could look out that window and make this terrible storm nothing more than a single cloud.”

Erik’s own lips curled in a faint smirk as he listened to his companion.

“And you try to tell me that we are not gods among men,” he noted before assembling Charles’s sandwich and putting it on a paper plate for him.

Charles rolled his eyes, letting out a little huff in the process, before taking the sandwich.

“May Miss Munroe never obtain delusions of goddess-hood, then. I do like my global weather patterns as they are at the moment, thank you very much.”

Erik took that as a cue to let the discussion go, especially as he was done with his own sandwich. He took a bite, then found himself looking around for--

The Coke bottle was held out for him, the smile behind it fond. Erik bowed his head in thanks, unwilling to speak with his mouth full, before flicking a finger and opening both bottles with a thought.

“Thank you, my friend,” Charles said as he settled onto the bed to start eating. He was only a couple of bites through, however, before his eyes went wide and his hand flew to his temple.

Erik tensed immediately, always wary of attack; they introduced themselves by name, used no aliases on this trip, and had spoken to more than a couple of people who’d decided not to come with them. Who knew what could be coming for them, even in this storm?

“There’s two of them,” Charles announced, vindication swelling through Erik at the words. It went away a moment later.

“Two mutants, caught in the storm. Oh God, one of them’s an infant, Erik. I don’t know where they came from; there was nothing and suddenly I heard--”

He flew to the window, it seemed, and threw open the curtains again and it was certainly a sight to behold out there.

The trees were bent almost to touching the ground and all matter of debris swept past them, slapping at the glass before tumbling away. It still wasn’t night, no matter the efforts of the black clouds, which left them just enough light to catch the shifting, towering form that seemed to be bearing down right upon them.

A tornado, spinning from ground to sky, lightning crackling around it like the wraith of an angry deity. Erik had to admit that the sight took him aback; he could feel the charges, the magnetic forces that formed the funnel itself, but he couldn’t dream of taking ahold of them.

“Oh dear God,” Charles repeated, finger stabbing against the glass, “look! Look there!”

Erik looked and as the wavering wobbling column of spinning death slowly began to approach their motel, he saw what specifically his friend was pointing to. There was a house, spinning wildly within the currents of air. An old farm house like something out of an old black-and-white movie. Pieces were flying off even as they watched, the structure tearing slowly apart from the forces carrying it well above the ground, but somehow the house was maintaining some manner of integrity.

“Charles...” he said warily, watching as the twister slinked closer, “Charles, I think we might want to switch rooms” His arm reached out for his friend, fingers closing around the other man’s arm “Charles--”

Charles’s eyes were set on the small spinning structure though, set well enough that he noticed the change in the curve of rotation. Almost immediately, he pulled away from Erik, slammed the curtains shut, and grabbed the other man.

“Behind the beds! NOW!”

Erik didn’t question it as they dove for cover, one hand reaching out to pull the bed frames from the carpet to make a shield of sorts between them and the window. Charles huddled beside him, fingers once more pressed desperately at his temple.

“Reinforce the window, Erik,” he said quickly, “it’s going to--”

Which was when the world turned into noise and the earth shook and Erik felt the window buckle in against the force of the structure flung at them by the storm. He held onto the beds and their frames as tightly as he could, the soft material providing a better buffer than he would have thought. After a minute or so, though, it was over and the only sounds were the tinkling of trembling glass and the soft cry of retreating winds. Charles tried to look over the beds, but Erik tugged him down immediately and took his place.

He couldn’t believe it.

The house was now all that remained of the front wall of the room. The rickety wooden structure had somehow managed to survive somewhat intact, well enough that Erik wondered what kind of wood these people built with. The door was gone, though, but nothing was visible in the darkness of the building since their motel room light had been smashed. He was going to look for more when he felt a tug on his arm; Charles was pulling away, running around their shield and through the door.

“Charles!” he snapped out, irritated and terrified in turns as he followed the other man past the debris and broken glass straight through the door of the rickety farm house. In fact, he almost ran into him as his friend stood stock still only a few feet in. Erik noticed he was staring at something and his admonishments disappeared in his throat as he took in the sight himself.

There was, in fact, someone inside the house. The boy, no, young man, there’s some bulk on him, Erik observed, was wearing simple and somewhat archaic clothes. His black hair spilled wildly over his face, obscuring everything but an extremely aquiline nose. Though curled up in a ball, Erik could see that he was tall, with long pale hands now covered in cuts and bruises that oozed a strangely dark color (thought he blamed the light for that). The curious thing was that his back rose and fell with the breath of the living, though he was obviously unconscious.

The more curious thing, however, was what he had been seemingly protecting.

Charles moved, finally, and knelt down to push the boy’s shoulder back and away but two fingers were clutched by an unbelievably small, chubby green hand. Tiny black eyes, sharp and hard as stones, looked out at him from beneath a tuft of her protector’s dark hair.

“Gott im Himmel...”

“The only explanation,” Charles agreed softly.

“They’re--”

Charles nodded. “Both of them,” he announced, though there was no challenging the green baby’s claim, “There are additional senses, more functions in the mind of a mutant as opposed to baseline humans; it’s how we access our abilities. I’m not sure where they came from or how they got here, but they are like us, my friend.”

Erik eyed the unconscious young man, then the baby, and tried to remember how to breathe again. The storm, then the crash, and now this. His mind started racing, trying to figure out what in the world they were going to do with a baby, what Division X would do with a baby, when something far more mundane struck him.

“...Charles?”

The telepath pulled his fingers from his temple, pausing in his attempt to wake the boy.

“You do realize that this house fell on our car, don’t you?”


	2. The Impossible

The young man’s name was Liir and the baby’s name was Rain. Erik judged the first to be no more than 22 at that, and the infant was apparently his daughter, the mother long gone. More importantly, at least one person in the lovely new room they’d been provided was insane and for once, Erik was damnably sure it wasn’t him.

“The Land of Oz,” Charles said, repeating the boy’s most recent, repeated, answer as if he was trying to figure out if he liked the taste of it for the thirteenth time.

Erik watched the boy’s eyes, almost unnaturally green in his pale face. They narrowed for a moment before rolling tiredly.

“Yes, as I said. Recently, and less recently, from the Vinkus.”

Charles looked intrigued, which meant that this was going to somehow manage to be an even longer night.

“You’re a Winkie then, if I remember correctly from my childhood reading?” Charles’s face was bright at first before dimming considerably; he winced. “Ah, that’s a slur, I see. My apologies. I won’t use it again.”

The boy remained silent as Charles dithered to himself, not questioning the strange route of the other man’s words, but after a moment tilted his head He looked as if he was going to ask his questioner a question himself, but instead chose to look over at Erik.

“Are we really in Kansas?” he asked.

Erik nodded with a brief, unpleasant chuckle. “Oh, yes.”

There was a glimmer of kinship as the boy let out a heartfelt “Fuck.”

\--

“He’s telling the truth, Erik,” Charles said, as quietly and as fervently as he could.

The young man was in the bathroom, changing his daughter’s diaper. They’d had to show him how the faucet worked, but he hadn’t wasted any time being amazed at the convenience or the technology and had instead summarily kicked them out to get matters dealt with.

“I’m sure he’s telling the truth, Charles, but the question is: how mad is he and can we leave him at the nearest hospital for treatment?”

Charles shook his head, stepping away from his friend to sit on the bed. He was troubled, that much was certain, but there was also a decent amount of giddiness in his frame; Erik could feel it in the flex of the bedsprings.

“It’s not a delusion, Erik,” his best friend informed him, rubbing at his eyes, “Delusions are different. They’re produced by the mind and the mind makes mistakes. It doesn’t produce details it doesn’t need and it doesn’t consider factors that aren’t immediately present. All of his memories of Oz, of the Vinkus, of... yes, even the woman who seems to be, of all people, the Wicked Witch of the West, are genuine.”

“All right then,” he offered as he sat on the bed across from Charles, his voice growing heated as he continued, “where is the nearest hospital so I can drop you off, because that simply isn’t possible, Charles.”

“A hundred years ago, flight would have been considered impossible. Not to mention people like us. What’s the Hamlet again? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’?”

“I don’t think the Bard was referencing _Munchkins_ , Charles.”

“Nor do I, but the fact remains,” he stressed, looking Erik firmly in the eye. “We have a young man and an infant who are in need of our assistance. Both of them are people like ourselves. Even if we find it difficult--”

“Insane.”

“--or insane, we have to help them. It’s not as if they have anywhere to go. And the young man might even be useful to us. From what I gather, he has military training.”

Which, to be quite frank, put him in a better position to assist them than most of those they’d already recruited.

“What are his powers, anyway? I know you’ve been in his head.”

Charles rubbed at his temple then, not because he was using his gifts but because he quite honestly had a headache.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted as he let his elbows rest on his knees. “His mind is... different.”

Erik waited for Charles to continue, but the other man shook his head.

“No more than that; different. Usually, it’s a matter of finding the extra systems that have mutated onto the standard human brain systems but his mind... it’s--”

“Extremely empty, I have no doubt.” The young man stood in the doorway of the bathroom, leaning against the frame with his daughter in one arm and the bag he’d used slung over the other.

“As for what I can do, it’s reasonably questionable as I might very well be insane as you’ve said, sir.”

Oddly enough, there was no malice in his voice. Just a weariness, a faint bitterness, and something mildly amused at both.

“But I am a crack shot. An excellent organizer. Resourceful cook. I speak two languages. I’ve survived my own idiocy when by all rights I should be dead at least three times over..”

“I don’t think we should--”

“Not to mention the broom.” The specific one he was referring to settled at his hip like a sword or a rifle in it’s holster; what he was holding it in seemed some sort of rigged up archery equipment. “Namely, flying on it. I can do that as well. Is that what you’re looking for?”

Charles’s eyes went directly for the item in question, fascinated and even a little delighted. For the first time, the barest hint of joy entered the young man’s features.

“I’ll show you tomorrow if I can go to bed now.”

Erik thought that was reasonable, even if the whole situation irritated him for it’s sheer eccentricity, and nodded in reply. Charles would keep questioning him forever if he didn’t take the opportunity and stop things now.

“Thank you. Now,” he turned his body to snatch the door handle in one hand, “if you don’t mind, I’m going to use the tub for a bed so you can have your room to yourselves.”

“Oh no,” Charles started, but Erik put up a hand to silence him. That worked very well; he would feel a doorknob move in the night and he still didn’t trust this situation one bit. Too many oddities and too many variables outside of his control and Charles so damnably giddy about it all...

“As I thought.” Which, oddly enough, came with a smile before Liir closed the door.


	3. The Pasts

Rain had been changed, fed, burped, and was more than ready to fall asleep with him which made settling down into the tub easy enough. The old black cloak, still dark as night and several times warmer, served better as a cushion than a covering since the storm had left a sticky heat to the air and the cooling machine that the man Erik had attempted to fiddle with for some minutes had apparently broken due to the damage from the storm.

The storm. He wasn’t sure what to think of it, after all, as it had both delivered him from his many evils to quite possibly plop him into others. Some wild part of him wondered if he’d provoked it, challenged the dusty earth of the Disappointments with his fears and hopes, his desperate desire to get out. He hadn’t been there when Dorothy’s house had dropped on Elphaba’s sister in the middle of Munchkinland, but he’d heard the story enough times, both from Dorothy herself and from whispers in the streets of the Emerald City, whispers that had taunted him for years. After all, what was left to him in Oz? What was left that he couldn’t destroy?

The thought of Trism made his heart clench in pain, but he refused to be selfish. Lady Glinda would take care of him, after all; he was handsome and brave and brilliantly skilled in any manner of directions. She would, and could, find a place for him if only out of some entirely misguided attempt to honor his mother’s memory.

And Candle had a place with the maunts; she had nothing to connect her to himself and nothing that the Gale Forcers would want her for. His feelings were just as strong for her, just as tight, but the pain was less severe. He could breathe thinking of Candle, even if the guilt of holding their daughter in his arms here in another world, far from her, weighed down on him.

It didn’t matter now. He’d leaped, as Trism would have put it, and now he was here in this strange world he’d heard far too much about far too long ago for anything useful to surface. There were apparently people like him here, something he doubted very much, and two very interesting men who wanted him for something.

Which made him suspicious.

Yet he couldn’t keep his eyes open long, the day holding too many hours as it was, and soon enough he was yawning out the last of his energy. Letting his eyes close, he leaned back against the soft layers of the cloak and let them wrap him in memories, words like warm hands against the back of his mind.

 _You are not alone._

And yet, as he drifted, he _drifted_. That was normal, that was what he was used to; while most people’s minds processed their day through their dreams, Liir tended to process more than just a day when he was unconscious. It was whatever was there, whatever whispered its secrets into his ear, whatever had soaked its way into the stones or the wood or the bed. Usually, it was pure mundanity, but tonight was different.

Tonight his past came back to haunt him and yet it wasn’t his past.

The children are playing games in the mauntery, their favorite game, the one where they see how test him, try to see how high they can bounce a rock off of his skin and it hurts but he tries to play so that they’ll play with him. Only now the stones are metal, blades and scalpels and forceps holding his mouth open. Testing him, forcing him, pushing him. A needle full of yellow liquid as the Emperor Apostle slips in to attend to his patients. They need him so much they don’t even know how much they need him, but Liir can hear them crying and begging and scrabbling to get away.

Cold, empty hallways; a home far too large for the few people in it. But these hallways were wooden, ornately carved panels made to accent the art hanging from the walls. He walks up to a room with all manner of noises inside of it and he is told by a voice seething with irritation to go away, find something to do with yourself. There’s a whole library for you, Charles.

Except it’s later and they won’t let him see, won’t let him in the room where he can hear the drip drip drip, the water bucket wine glass drip drip drip. But he’s in the room, is he in the room? All is good, all is good and then there’s a crack and a thud and a drip drip drip. He never hears that voice again, never hears it say good things or angry things or frustrated things again and something in him still longs to hear anything at all. Gone because he should have been there. Couldn’t have been there. Incompetent. Failure. Unwanted.

But then he’s back again, everyone here, still not full, the keep, the old waterworks, dark and dank and hidden away from the world. There’s all the sisters, Sarima, Irji, Nor. Nor with blue diamonds across her skin and hair as red as a pfenix feather only she doesn’t have those things, he knows she doesn’t. Her eccentricity is of the mind and of actions and things that pop out of her mouth. More importantly, she is nothing. Because she’s gone.

The soldiers come and no one’s there to save them. No one’s there to tell them no and he knows them, watches them put Sarima and the others in irons, shuffles them off and away, out of the gate. He knows nothing good is beyond there, not for them, not like this. He pulls at the gate, pulls and pulls and pulls but he can’t be. He can’t be because he’s in a sack, tossed aside, left behind in the dark and cold of a fishwell where the goldfish is telling him all the horrible things people think but don’t say, all the horrible little thoughts in their heads and he’d rather die than hear anymore.

\--

Charles woke up, pushing himself out of the covers as he tried to remember how to breathe properly. The noise made Erik stir, anxious enough as it is. He’s out of the bed in seconds.

“Charles, what’s--”

His friend swallowed with obvious effort before reaching over to flick on the light. His eyes were still wet and there was a tear slipping down his cheek. Erik’s teeth clenched at that.

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

Charles shook his head and wiped the tear away as if it was nothing, a bit of the Sandman’s leavings, but his eyes went immediately to the bathroom. The metal knob of the door trembled but Charles raised his hand.

“It’s not the boy,” which was the truth and the lie all at once. It wasn’t the boy, exactly, but it was the echo of his strange gift in Charles’s mind, the mad blending of histories into nightmare upon nightmare.

“Then what is it?"”

“Nothing. Bad dreams. Just--”

“Are you lying to me, Charles?”

The other man shook his head, running fingers through his sweat-damp hair in a further effort to calm himself.

“Bad dreams,” he repeated, “though caused by him, I will admit. Not-” and he held a hand up to keep Erik from shooting through the door, “on purpose. Not remotely. The feeling I get is that his gifts are reaching out, trying to learn about the world around him, where he’s landed. It’s subconscious.”

“And?”

“And,” Charles continued, glancing towards the bathroom door, “he picked up on the two of us. I sensed it because of my own gifts, even asleep.”

Frankly, Charles was glad that was the case. He didn’t want to think of Erik’s response to the experience, if he’d been a part of it. Erik looked displeased enough as it was.

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means that he experienced some of our past. It’s part of what I meant when I said his mind worked differently than I’m familiar with. It’s not telepathy; it’s actually closer to psychometry, though there are parts of it I’ve yet to understand, parts he barely understands yet.”

“Wonderful,” Erik noted with a low growl, “more people inside my head. Just what I wanted.”

“I doubt he’ll remember it, really. Or if he does, how much use he’ll be able to make of it. The memories were jumbled, part mine and part yours and even part his.” Charles swallowed and gave a short shudder.

“Suffice to say I have learned Oz is not quite so wonderful as I once thought.”


End file.
